Church and state, state and church

I’m always interested in discussions of the intersection of the two. Here’s one, in case you are interested in such matters too:

What we have in two cases being deal with at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario is a case of the state trying to tell a church and a religious organization what to do and that is scary. One case involves the rights tribunal examining whether a Roman Catholic bishop should be forced to reinstate a gay man as an altar server, the other a non-Catholic trying to get tribunal to rule that a Catholic school cannot favour Catholic teachers in its hiring. Both should be thrown out, neither should have even been looked at.

Comments

I have had it up to over my ears with these kangaroo courts, they are nothing but a Canadian Gestapo. Headed by commissars: “Frau” Jennifer Lynch and Commissar Barbara Hall. (Plus other lackeys in other provinces)
They and their henchmen/women are breaking the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guarantees Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion.

grenadier said it better than I could. I would also wonder why so many have a problem with the church i.e.. the people of the congregations bringing their values to the government. Our country has been operating on Christian values since day one. Our basic laws are in a way the 10 commandments in a different format whether a lot of folks like it or not. We do not need the government in our churches but we do need church values in our government.

To those that would like to change all that I say ” DON`T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU ON THE BUTT AS YOU LEAVE THIS GREAT COUNTRY”.

“Our basic laws are in a way the 10 commandments in a different format whether a lot of folks like it or not. ”

I have a very good little speech I like to give on this subject in which I go through the ten commandments and explain exactly why they have no influence on the law. But it’s a speech for a US audience, I don’t know enough about Canadian law to properly adapt it.

It doesn’t end well for the ten commandments… I classify them all as either ‘unconstitutional,’ ‘uninfluencial’ or ‘common sense.’ All except the sabbath law, anyway – distant decendants of that one survive, at least in the US.

Despite what your speech says about them being unconstitutional and so on the laws of the free world evolved out of the concepts of the 10 commandments. How you classify them today according to your values is of little consequence.

To classify each of the Ten Commandments as either “unconstitutional”, “uninfluential”, or “common-sense”, would seem to depend a lot on the biases of the individual. Particularly on the matter of whether a commandment is uninfluential, as that is a very subjective designation. But really, our opinion today is quite irrelevant when compared to the opinions of the people who actually wrote the laws of their nation. Like it or not, people like the US Founding Fathers often referenced the Ten Commandments and the Bible as a foundation for how they derived individual rights and national law. Usually the benefit of the doubt should go to the author. To marginalize that, one would need to explain why they wouldn’t have written the laws any differently had they not had that frame-of-mind, but I think any attempt to do so would be purely speculative.

I generally concur with Bob. It is ironic that people blame the Bible for atrocities that it doesn’t encourage, and yet the same people will give it no credit for being the foundation for laws which it does encourage.

In context with the original post, a government that essentially dictates to the Church that it can’t hold to certain standards has essentially made itself a god above God. This is a threatened freedom in Canada, and the separation of church and state was explicitly intended to prevent it.

Like Suricou Raven, I also have a short speech I like to give on this subject. Unlike Suricou’s, it doesn’t end well for the state in its current state. As a Christian, I believe that the civil government is a minister of God and rulers are responsible to Him. Their main task is to protect their citizens from evil-doers and exercise justice. This task is different from the church’s task; I am not confusing the two. I do believe in a certain separation of church and state. (And I’m not certain but I’ve heard that the concept is a development in Christian thought, with both Anabaptist and Calvinist influence.)

Of course, a democracy is set up so that the government is responsible to the people, at least theoretically. Since democracies always get the government they deserve, perhaps I should be more critical of Canadians generally. But I am one of them.

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